The Climatist Offensive 2006-…

climate alarmism, L2, ngrams/correlate

Updated & Corrected, 2nd time:
N-grams show that the climatist offensive started in 2006, apparently following the release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.  Nevertheless, majority of decisions and most “work” on that movie was done in 2004-2005.

This follow-up post draws on readers’ comments on my recent piece A Short History of Climatism in Google Ngrams, published on WUWT. Climatism launched a major PR offensive in 2006 and continued it through at least 2008. In 2006, the alarmist bodies manufactured and put into broad circulation a nasty term, climate change denial. At the same time, they introduced or sharply expanded the use of a number of Newspeak phrases, such as global climate disruption, climate refugees, and ocean acidification. The following graph shows these terms’ appearance according to Google Ngrams (notice the scaling factors):

Ngrams Climatist PR Offensive 2004
Ngrams Climatist PR Offensive 2006

A sharp increase in the use of the terms climate change and global warming also started in 2006. A more interesting phenomenon was a jump in the usage of the term carbon credits. Remember, Al Gore and his partners founded the Chicago Climate Exchange in 2003, for the explicit purpose of trading “carbon credits.”

Ngrams graph, showing strong correlation between phrase "climate change" and "carbon credits"
Ngrams climate change and carbon credits

A few possible causes for the timing of the offensive, in addition to the release of An Inconvenient Truth:

  1. Radicalization of the Democratic Party and its allies after losing 2004 elections; their increased linkage with the foreign enemies on the background of the Iraq war; their conscious decision to use the climate alarm as a “wedge issue” to split and polarize the American society.
  2. Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick exposed the Mann’s hockey stick fraud in their November 2003 paper. The time between the publication and the start of the offensive seems short, but McIntyre and McKitrick attempted to engage Michael Mann in a scientific debate for some time prior to the publication. The only result of these attempts was that the alarmist propaganda machine was forewarned and ready to strike immediately afterwards.  Also, the absence of global warming from 1998 to 2005.
  3. Al Gore’s business of trading carbon credits, mentioned above.

The original post was published on 02/26/2016.